DONNE, JOHN. - English poet and preacher, b. in London in 1573, d. there on 31 March 1631. Educated in the Catholic religion (his mother was of the family of St. Thomas More), he passed over to the Anglican Church.
After an adventurous, dissipated and sceptical youth, of which there are testimonies in the licentious love poems, in the pessimism of the poem Progresse of the Soule, in the cynicism of the Satires and in the apology for suicide (Biathanatos), he turned to the religious life and was ordained an Anglican priest. He had already won the king's favour with certain writings of anti-Catholic opportunism (Pseudo-Martyr; Conclave Ignatii, satires of the Jesuits) when the success of his sermons made him rise step by step until he became dean of St. Paul's in London. While the Satires are little more than a literary exercise, D.'s lyrics are of great importance for their characteristics and for the influence they exercised on the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. D. reacted against the prevailing Petrarchism: subordinating sound to meaning, using the unadorned language of everyday speech, disdaining metrical conventions, and above all taking pleasure in baroque boldnesses, subtleties, conceits and images, he produced a new and ingenious work, which, if it often proves obscure through an excess of cerebration, at times attains great beauty. His religious poems earned him a reputation for mysticism, but in reality they do not move: one feels the cold play of the intellect and not the warmth of faith; just as in the sermons, which, despite the rhetorical emphasis and the sacred erudition they display, leave one cold. More effective are the poems (and the sermons) inspired by the theme of death, which D. felt strongly, and which also redeems in an aura of noble meditation certain crude love poems.
Bibliography6 worksOpere: The Poems of J. D., edited by H. J. Grierson, Oxford 1912; D.'s Sermons (selection) edited by L. P. Smith, ibid. 1919; but anyone wis
BIBL.: Opere: The Poems of J. D., edited by H. J. Grierson, Oxford 1912; D.'s Sermons (selection) edited by L. P. Smith, ibid. 1919; but anyone wishing to know D.'s sermons better must still have recourse to the ed. by Alford 1839 (The Works of J. D., 6 vols.) which includes most of them (not all were published). Studies: I. Waton, The Life of J. D., London 1658 (republished by Morley in 1888); E. Gosse, The Life and Letters of J. D., ibid. 1899; M. Praz, Mariniismo e secentismo in Inghilterra, Florence 1925, pp. 3-141; I. Husein, The Mystical Element in the Metaphysical Poets of the 17th Century, London 1949.
Donini, Filippo. “Donne, john.” In Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. IV, coll. 1877–1878. Città del Vaticano: Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1950. https://azioneromana.com/article/donne-john.
MLA
Donini, Filippo. “Donne, john.” Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. IV, Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1950, coll. 1877–1878. Azione Romana, https://azioneromana.com/article/donne-john.
BibTeX
@incollection{ec4_donne_john,
author = {Donini, Filippo},
title = {Donne, john},
booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica},
volume = {IV},
pages = {1877--1878},
note = {Cited by column},
publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico},
address = {Città del Vaticano},
year = {1950},
url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/donne-john}
}
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